The artist’s first pixie house from 2017, and a protest house with ‘trademark’ door
THE artist creating pixie houses around tree trunks and stumps has told of how she began making them after the death of a friend.
The woman – who wants to remain anonymous like a “Banksy of Barnsbury” – spoke to the Tribune after we reported last week how comic actor Paul Whitehouse had lamented some of the models going missing in Alwyne Villas.
“It’s quite a sad story,” she said, explaining how her pixie art started in 2017, in a tree stump in Goswell Road.
When her friend passed away, the grandmother-of-five decided she wanted to do something for her own grandchildren, should she also die an untimely death.
“The very first house was for my friend,” she said. “So my friend passed and I’d just had two grandchildren. And at the end of her life she said, ‘I’m never going to get to see my grandchildren.’ After she died, I threw myself into my art. I thought, I’ve got to get out there and do something. I wanted to leave something for my grandchildren so that if I’m not here they can walk past it and go ‘my nan made that’ – a little legacy I can leave for them.”
But having now made more than 50 across the borough – and even a few further afield – the Angel-based artist acknowledges it has gone beyond being a tribute to her friend.
“It brings joy to me to see other people’s happiness when they see it,” the 59-year-old said.
“When people contact me to say how much they enjoy it and how it takes them out of their mundane, normal, everyday life, it just gives me joy.”
One woman messaged to say seeing a pixie house while riding on the bus with a tantrumming toddler had briefly taken her out of her reality and she became “lost in a world of pixies”. The artist said: “That cracked me up.”
She said she could partially clear up the mystery in Alwyne Villas: They were moved by the council to a tree around the corner after their stump was removed, although they have since vanished from that site too.
Diseased trees are chopped down in the summer and their stumps pulled out and replanted in the winter.
Among the tree homes she has made, which include a gym and a Bank of Pixo, she said her favourite was The Wishing Door, which was along the canal.
“It said ‘tap on the door, blow me a kiss, count to three and make your wish,’” she said.
But one day, it was gone. “And that’s painful to me,” she said. “When I see people destroy it, it hurts.”
She used to fix her trinkets down with two-inch nails but now uses nine inches.
“The biggest I can find,” she said. “It’s not kids taking it – it’s adults. Kids couldn’t get a nine-inch nail out. Leave the Pixie Houses alone! It’s not for you – it’s for the kids.”
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